Reconstructing Identity: A Personal Pespective

Challenged by adverse experiences in the first year of law school, the author of this paper uses her experience to trigger an analysis of identity discourse in the law. In Part I, she shares her experience and characterizes it as an epistemological dilemma to the traditional legal methods of identity construction. She introduces the two traditional methods of identity construction: the impartial trajectory and the categorical trajectory and briefly demonstrates that, because her experience was specific to her first year of law school at Dalhousie University, both trajectories limit her claim to knowledge. Using her own experience and others found in the literature, the author reconstructs a legal paradigm to identity. Throughout the paper, the author draws upon illustrations, literature and theory from various sources: (dis)ability, gender, race, and sexual orientation. It is in the author\u27s view that all of these claims encounter similar challenges to expression and identity